09 July

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Trademark Infringement in Nigeria: How Courts Assess Confusion, Similarity and Counterfeiting

in Class Notes, Educational Articles, IP Law

Walk into a roadside pharmacy in Oshodi and you might find a box labelled "Panadon" sitting next to genuine "Panadol" on the shelf. The packaging uses the same blue-and-white colour scheme. The font is nearly identical. A tired, unwell shopper grabbing medication quickly may not notice the difference. In a market where counterfeit pharmaceuticals have killed people, the question of whether these two marks are confusingly similar is not an abstract legal exercise. It is a public safety question that trademark law must answer. Understanding how Nigerian courts determine whether trademark infringement has occurred, how they assess whether one mark is...

09 July

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How to Register a Trademark in Nigeria: Parts A and B of the Register

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in Class Notes, Educational Articles, IP Law, Study Resources

Imagine you have spent three years building a small pepper sauce brand in Port Harcourt. Your distinctive label, your invented brand name, and the loyal customer base you have cultivated across the Niger Delta represent real commercial value. One morning you discover that a Lagos distributor has started selling a very similar product under a nearly identical name, and is already advertising it to retailers. You want to sue. Then your lawyer asks the single most important procedural question in Nigerian trademark law: is your mark registered? If the answer is no, section 3 of the Trade Marks Act immediately closes...

09 June

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Emotional Perception AI Ltd v Comptroller General of Patents [2026] UKSC 3: How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Rules on AI Patents

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in AI and Law, Case Analysis, Educational Articles, Landmark Judgments

For twenty years, a UK patent applicant whose invention ran on a computer faced a particular kind of frustration. It was not enough to show that the invention was new, clever, or commercially valuable. The applicant first had to survive a threshold test that had nothing to do with those qualities. Under the Aerotel framework, the courts asked a preliminary question that tripped up a significant number of genuinely novel software and artificial intelligence inventions before they could even be assessed on their merits. In February 2026, the UK Supreme Court looked at that framework, found it logically flawed, and...

01 May

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How to Acquire Membership of a Company in Nigeria and Who Qualifies

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 300 Level, Class Notes, Company Law, Educational Articles, Exam Preparation, Study Resources

In Nigerian company law, being a shareholder and being a member of a company are not the same thing. A person may hold shares in a company without yet being its member. A member may cease to hold shares and yet remain on the register. The distinction, which Nigerian courts have consistently maintained, is not a technicality. It determines who may vote at general meetings, who may enforce the articles as a statutory contract, who bears liability in a winding up, and whose name appears on the document that constitutes the ultimate proof of membership: the register of members. This article...

01 May

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Keir v Leeman (1846) 9 QB 371: When an Agreement to Drop Charges Becomes Illegal

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 200 Level, Case Analysis, Educational Articles, Landmark Judgments, Law of Contract

Suppose a creditor has secured a judgment against a debtor, and in the process of enforcing it, the debtor's associates commit riot and attack a police officer. The creditor lays criminal charges. A third party then offers to pay the outstanding debt if the creditor drops the prosecution. The creditor agrees, abandons the charges, and the third party refuses to pay. Can the creditor sue to recover? That is precisely the question resolved in Keir v Leeman (1846) 9 QB 371. The answer was no. The Keir v Leeman agreement to stifle prosecution was held void as contrary to public policy,...

26 April

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Corporate Personality in Nigerian Law: The Salomon Principle and the Veil of Incorporation

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 300 Level, Class Notes, Company Law, Educational Articles

Every year in Nigeria, thousands of companies are incorporated through the Corporate Affairs Commission. The promoters sign the memorandum of association, pay the prescribed fees, and receive their certificate of incorporation. What many of them do not immediately grasp is that something remarkable has happened at the moment that certificate is issued: a new legal person has come into existence. Not a human person, but a person nonetheless, one capable of owning property, entering contracts, suing and being sued, and outliving every human being who created it. This is the doctrine of corporate personality, and it is the single most foundational...

26 April

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History of Company Law in Nigeria: From Trade by Barter to CAMA 2020

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 300 Level, Class Notes, Company Law, Educational Articles, Exam Preparation, Study Resources

Long before a single ordinance was drafted, before any company was registered, before the term "corporate personality" entered the Nigerian legal vocabulary, commerce existed. The Yoruba marketplace, the trans-Saharan trade routes of the Hausa-Fulani north, the Igbo long-distance trading networks: these were sophisticated systems of exchange, credit, and commercial trust operating entirely outside any written legal framework. Trade was by barter. Obligation was enforced by custom, community, and reputation. There was no concept of a company. There was no need for one. That world was not inferior. It was simply different. And it was this world that colonial contact transformed, first...

19 April

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Death as a Cause of Action in Law: What Families of Accident Victims Can Claim

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 200 Level, Class Notes, Educational Articles, Exam Preparation, Law of Torts, Study Resources

In June 2012, Dana Airlines Flight 992 crashed into a densely populated residential area at Iju-Ishaga, Lagos, killing all 153 persons on board and 10 people on the ground. Among the dead were fathers, mothers, breadwinners, and children. Their families were left not only with grief but with the immediate, crushing financial reality of lost income and lost support. The law's response to this tragedy illustrates one of the most important and underappreciated areas of Nigerian tort law: death as a cause of action. The question is not just whether someone is criminally responsible for the deaths. The question that tort...

19 April

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The Tort of Nuisance in Nigerian Law: Generator Noise, Oil Spills, and Your Legal Rights

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 200 Level, Class Notes, Educational Articles, Exam Preparation, Law of Torts, Study Resources

Picture this. You have just moved into a quiet residential estate in Lekki. Three weeks later, your neighbour sets up a commercial generator that runs from 6am to 11pm, six days a week. The fumes drift through your windows. Your children cannot sleep. Your concentration at work is shattered. You complain, informally. Nothing changes. Or consider a different scenario. An oil company has been operating a pipeline through your community in Bayelsa for two decades. Over time, there have been spills. The farmland your family depends on is contaminated. Fish have disappeared from the creeks. The water is no longer safe....

19 April

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Defences to Negligence in Tort Law: Volenti, Contributory Negligence and More

Posted by Kolawole Adebowale

in 200 Level, Class Notes, Educational Articles, Exam Preparation, Law of Torts, Study Resources

Imagine you are knocked down by a danfo bus on Ikorodu Road, Lagos. You have a broken leg, medical bills, and two weeks of lost income. You instruct a lawyer, who confirms that the bus driver was clearly negligent. You file your claim, confident in the outcome. Then the defendant's lawyer stands up and says: "Yes, our client was negligent. But the plaintiff was crossing at the wrong point on the road, wearing dark clothing at night, without looking left or right." Suddenly, your apparently straightforward case has a complication. This is what defences to negligence do. They either completely defeat a...

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